Re: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism
And Lo, the LORD looked upon the grave sins of the evil tabbites, and through the prophet James, he called upon the the wise and peaceful fourspacians to take up plowshares and text editors and to hammer them into swords, and to fall upon the wicked tabbites and rend them asunder with vicious bloody smiting. And when the deed had been done, the LORD looked down and spake so it shall be for now and for always, the fourspacians shall import and subclass over all the earth. But a certain fourspacian indented his code with only two spaces, and was well-pleased with himself, saying what I have done is good, and will please the LORD, and so the twospacians were born, and they strove against the fourspacians, and chaos continued in the lands of pythonia. On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 08:58:10AM -0700, Bill Coderre wrote: With no disrespect to either my exceedingly learned colleagues from Lilliput who use spaces, or my sublimely enlightened colleagues from Blefuscu who use tabs[1], this is Yet Another Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism.[2] The only problem is that our computers, which can be so lightning-fast at replacing characters, cannot seem, even at this late date in their evolution, to figure out when two lines are similarly indented and therefore execute our code without complaint. Their text-editing programs are only confounding the matter. My meager solution has been to turn on an option that displays a faint glyph representing each tab. Therefore, when I open a file, I somewhat subliminally see which lines have an indenting problem, and I fix them. Perhaps a better solution would be to agree on a spaces-tabs exchange rates, but this, also has its zealots. Some people use a tab to mean eight spaces, some four, and some two. Is there some unix magic cookie format to explicate this exchange rate? If so, then the battle is mostly won, and we merely have to convince the myriad text editors to publish, honor, and obey the cookies, silently sorting out the indentations and replacing whichever with whatever. If not, we just have to add the cookie format to Python's spec. [1] cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology [2] See also Endianness, above, Emacs versus vi, brackets on new lines, etc.
Re: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism
surely 8 half spaces is better than 4 spaces. cu, On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:26 AM, Michael George mdgeo...@cs.cornell.eduwrote: Bill Coderre wrote: Is there some unix magic cookie format to explicate this exchange rate? If so, then the battle is mostly won, and we merely have to convince the myriad text editors to publish, honor, and obey the cookies, silently sorting out the indentations and replacing whichever with whatever. Sure! We should just use vim modelines: vim: ts=4 sw=4 et That will surely avoid any pointless time-wasting religious fervor. --Mike
Re: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism
my two cents: tab = 4 spaces also a --converttabs numberOfSpaces option on the python interpreter would be neat, automaticly converting all tabs in the module being opened to numberOfSpaces spaces. So python --converttabs 4 would convert all spaces to 4 tabs. --- On Wed, 5/20/09, Bill Coderre b...@mac.com wrote: From: Bill Coderre b...@mac.com Subject: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism To: pygame-users@seul.org Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 10:58 AM On May 20, 2009, at 4:24 AM, d...@amberfisharts.com wrote: Both, tabs and spaces, work. mixing them doesn't. So you must make sure you only use one. which one you choose is more or less a matter of taste as Chris wrote. However, since mixing spaces and tabs is a bad idea it would be good if all (python) programmers could agree on one or the other. I believe that's why there is the python style guide I linked to earlier. It sets a precedent/convention. You can of course say you don't care and follow your own style but it will make it harder and more annoying for others. Therefore I would urge you to use spaces in python programs. With no disrespect to either my exceedingly learned colleagues from Lilliput who use spaces, or my sublimely enlightened colleagues from Blefuscu who use tabs[1], this is Yet Another Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism.[2] The only problem is that our computers, which can be so lightning-fast at replacing characters, cannot seem, even at this late date in their evolution, to figure out when two lines are similarly indented and therefore execute our code without complaint. Their text-editing programs are only confounding the matter. My meager solution has been to turn on an option that displays a faint glyph representing each tab. Therefore, when I open a file, I somewhat subliminally see which lines have an indenting problem, and I fix them. Perhaps a better solution would be to agree on a spaces-tabs exchange rates, but this, also has its zealots. Some people use a tab to mean eight spaces, some four, and some two. Is there some unix magic cookie format to explicate this exchange rate? If so, then the battle is mostly won, and we merely have to convince the myriad text editors to publish, honor, and obey the cookies, silently sorting out the indentations and replacing whichever with whatever. If not, we just have to add the cookie format to Python's spec. [1] cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology [2] See also Endianness, above, Emacs versus vi, brackets on new lines, etc.
Re: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism
Bill Coderre wrote: Perhaps a better solution would be to agree on a spaces-tabs exchange rates That would negate the main benefit of using tabs (only), which is precisely that they *don't* represent any fixed amount of indentation. You can set your editor to display them using whatever spacing you prefer. Unfortunately, the totally haphazard way that the various tools out there handle tabs makes it impractical to use them this way outside of a controlled environment. Given that, the convention of four-space indents makes sense as an *interchange* format. Use whatever works best for you internally, but convert to four-space indents when sharing code with others. Cookies wouldn't really help unless all the tools out there (not just text editors, but print formatters, mail and news handlers, etc.) understood them. And if we had the power to make them do that, we could make them handle tabs in a consistent way in the first place, and we wouldn't have a problem. -- Greg
